In the world of SEO, we all understand and embrace the idea that content is king. For most, that means challenging teams to constantly create fresh new content that’s constructive for site users and easily digestible for the search engines. A lot of time and energy can go into generating those content ideas. Sometimes, though, it shouldn’t require that much energy. Sometimes, the content is right there, already published on the site and it just needs some retooling to breathe fresh life into it. Let’s look at the concept of repurposing content and the relative benefits.

Repurposing vs. Revamping: Is There a Difference?

First, we need to make a distinction between repurposing and revamping content. At first glance, they look similar, but they are different concepts. Knowing the difference between the two as well as your specific goals and promotional strategy will dictate which one you might employ.

The primary distinction is this: revamping a piece of content will serve the same purpose for which it was initially intended and target the same audience. Updating a blog post would be an example of revamping content. Repurposing content means changing the format and likely the audience to which it’s targeted. An example would be taking key content from an existing PDF and creating an eye-catching infographic.

The Benefits

Revamping content can be beneficial to both the audience and consequently SEO. Using the blog update example, if your new information is significant enough, that post may impress readers and earn new life being circulated and ultimately improve the chance for it to rank well for critical keyword phrases.

Repurposing content adds value in multiple ways:

Reaching Across Multiple Platforms: Doing things like converting webinars to videos, or turning dense PDFs into infographics, it increases the ability to promote that content across multiple channels beyond your domain.

Reinforcing the Message: By broadcasting your message across multiple media in different formats, you increase the likelihood that the message will be remembered and acted upon.

SEO Benefit: Creating variations on a theme and distributing across multiple channels increases the potential for organic search traffic from a host of sources.

Here are a few examples of the variety of content that could be produced repurposing existing content:

Infographics

Newsletters

Case Studies

Podcast

Whitepapers

Lists

Memes

Webinars

Cross-Promotion Is Vital

When you develop new content, be sure to leverage it across all of the tools at your disposal. If you’ve created a new video, certainly you want that posted to your site’s YouTube channel, but don’t forget to promote that across any and every social media channel at hand. Push it out on your Facebook page, tweet it on Twitter, and announce it on LinkedIn. Use every reasonable channel you can access to push that content to as broad an audience as possible to increase the potential that it’s going to be shared and establish authority.

In short, when considering how to generate new content for your site, don’t forget to evaluate the potential of repurposing critical existing content into new formats. Sometimes you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You just need to renew the treads to get more constructive mileage.